Is Turkey’s Kurdish problem spiraling out of control?
The timing could not have been worse. On Wednesday, Oct. 19, militants belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) launched a four-hour assault on an isolated Turkish army garrison in the southeast of the country, killing some 24 soldiers. The Turkish military responded with overwhelming force, commencing a 10,000-man land and air operation inside Turkey. Special forces also crossed into northern Iraq in an attempt to crush PKK bases located there.
The outrage in Turkey over one of the deadliest PKK attacks in recent memory threatens to undo the Turkish government’s efforts to resolve its festering Kurdish problem through political means. Instead, pressure will mount on the Turkish government to double down on the failed strategy of using violence to repress Kurdish aspirations. President Abdullah Gül did not mince words when he said that the PKK “will see that the revenge for these attacks will be massive and much stronger.”
This latest attack — which is part of a broader campaign of renewed violence — may also indicate a split within the PKK between a moderate faction looking for a negotiated solution and hardliners, who are unwilling to give up the armed struggle. The hardliners may even be egged on by Iran and Syria, which are using the group to pressure Ankara to back off its criticisms of the embattled Syrian regime.
The PKK’s long-running guerilla war against the Turkish military stems from Turkey’s relentless effort to force the Kurds, who represent up to 20 percent of the population, to sacrifice their identity. For decades, the Kurdish language was banned, the very existence of Kurds denied, and any sign of Kurdish activism, however benign, was punished. The rise to power of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, however, has led the state to increasingly acknowledge the Kurds’ existence. For Erdogan, the Kurdish problem represents a roadblock in his efforts to position Turkey as a regional, if not global, power. As the prime minister gained the upper hand against Turkey’s powerful military establishment, which bitterly opposed any rapprochement with the Kurds, he was increasingly free to discuss potential solutions to the Kurdish problem.
Turkish Kurds are not uniformly pro-PKK, although the organization tugs at most Kurds’ heartstrings for giving their community a voice after a long period of oblivion. The main Kurdish political party, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), is close to the PKK — it shares the same political base, and often the same members. A significant segment of the Kurdish population, especially the more pious and conservative Kurds, however, supports the AKP.
Most Kurds, irrespective of their political affiliation, almost always relate three demands, in the same order of importance, to resolve their conflict with the Turkish state. First, they want a new constitution to replace the military-imposed 1982 document, which equates citizenship exclusively with Turkish ethnicity. Second, they want complete cultural freedom to use the Kurdish language in all facets of everyday life, including politics, media, culture. Third, they want a relaxation of the extremely centralized nature of the Turkish state, which has given Ankara the power to stifle local expressions of Kurdishness.
Unlike in the early 1990s, Turkey’s Kurds, by and large, are no longer interested in establishing an independent state. This is primarily because they no longer solely occupy the traditionally Kurdish areas in the east and southeast of the country. Years of counterinsurgency campaigns have devastated many of these areas, forcing families to migrate to the coastal cities of the south and especially to Istanbul, which today contains two to four million Kurds, making it the largest Kurdish city in the world. This forced migration has led to the emergence of an alienated group of very violent Kurdish youth, who reside in the shantytowns of large cities and towns and are unwilling to heed the Kurdish political leadership…